And, frankly, that kind of thinking makes no sense to me.
It makes sense if you don't start from the perspective of assuming that Facebook, with its long track record of outright contempt towards privacy, is sincere in their claims that they care about privacy now.
Like it or not, billions of people use Facebook.
Billions of people also used leaded gasoline. That doesn't mean that doing away with it wasn't a very good thing.
I've spent my whole career as a programmer, and none of the software I've written professionally has had any competition from the FOSS realm, because it's all been highly domain-specific stuff that's for very specific business users who are not programmers.
Open-source software tends to get written for one of two use cases. Either tools that programmers build because they personally find it useful, or stuff that appeals to a very broad, general-audience user base (web browsers and games, for example.) If it doesn't fall into one of these two categories, the odds that an open-source project to cover it will even exist at all are extremely narrow.
So hopefully you aren't calling for a "general ban" on non-open-source software, because in practice this would equate to a ban on 90% of all software, period. But if not, what specifically do you want to mandate here?
Why are you bringing lock-in into this? I didn't say anything about lock-in. I said that centralization is inevitable, and demonstrated that it has happened in the realm of email when you tried to claim that email was a counterexample. Nothing more. Once again, please stop putting words in my mouth.
I didn't say anything about monopolies here; please stop misrepresenting me. What I said was that it's human nature that large numbers of small groups will consolidate and centralize into small numbers of large groups, and that the example given, email providers, does in fact follow this pattern, both in individual email and in the business realm.
Pointing out that Microsoft and Google have multiple different ways to manage email does nothing to change the fact that people are managing their email with Microsoft and Google systems.
Yes, obviously some minor outliers do exist. But they're statistically insignificant enough to disregard when talking about the big picture. If someone refers to "all" or "none" in a discussion like this, it should properly be understood as including the words "within epsilon."
No, breaking them up would be punishing them for being abusive, which is a highly desirable thing in civilized society. (It's basically half of what people generally have in mind when they discuss the concept of "justice.") And if being abusive is how they grew to be so successful, then by all means, let's destroy that!
Again, when taking down the ad can be used as evidence to further the agenda the ad was attempting to drive, it's not a particularly good idea.
Sometimes you're in a situation where there are no good options. Hypothetically, this could happen to you just because, and then life sucks for you. In reality--particularly in the business world--it usually happens as a result of you having done something to earn it.
Additionally, virtually everyone who works in an office has a work email run on a private server.
Yes, and I was including that in my statement. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Every office I've ever worked at, the work email ran on Outlook, which is run by Microsoft. I'm aware of a few competitors in that space, but the only one I know of that has gotten any traction comes from...
History shows a pendulum that swings back and forth between centralization and decentralization, especially in technology. We went from giant mainframes to more decentralized systems in the past, and then back to more centralized services, and we can go back to more decentralized systems in the future.
I'm actually very familiar with the "pendulum" in question, and you're unfortunately framing it quite out of context here. I'm talking about social structures, and you're responding with an example based on technological limitations. The underlying technical issues you're addressing weren't about centralized vs. decentralized social structures, but about centralized vs. individual technological work.
We started out with big mainframes because computers were big and expensive--a super-scarce resource--and the most efficient way to make use of them was to build way more computer than one person needed and share it between many people. Once Moore's Law got us to the point where individuals could have their own desktop computers with the processing power to take care of the work they needed, starting in the late 70s, things shifted to that paradigm because it simply works a lot better for various technical and user-experience reasons. But most computer work, even in the mainframe era, was not "social" in the sense we think of it today; it was a bunch of individuals sharing a powerful server.
Then, a couple decades later in the late 90s, the Web browser came along and made the Internet accessible to the average Joe. The Web was built on top of the Internet, which was originally designed as a decentralized system for a very, very specific purpose--to provide widespread geographic redundancy in order to make the total destruction of important information difficult even in the event of a nuclear attack, because Cold War--and started out with a decentralized architecture by default simply because it inherited that from the Internet. But the technical systems were a rigid client/server setup reminiscent of the old-time mainframes, because that was easy to implement.
Over time, both of these factors have flipped around. Without the specific constraints that applied to the design of the original Internet providing an overriding direction, human nature has run its course and we've seen the Web as a social system consolidate and centralize. On the technological front, however, we've re-learned the lessons of the past, that the rigid mainframe/client setup sucks for a number of reasons, and developed all sorts of technologies to push as much of the individual work of the Web as possible down to the individual client devices. Technologies such as AJAX, websockets, SPA frameworks and most notably smartphone apps that run mostly locally but use Internet connections to augment their functionality are indicative of this trend.
The social and technological sides of the Internet are distinct things that work in different ways (hence the common admonition in developer circles not to try to solve a social problem with a technical solution) and conflating the two simply causes confusion.
To paraphrase a famous quote from Jurassic Park, don't spend so much time thinking about whether you can that you forget to consider whether you should.
If you're going to appeal to common sense, consider this: When the argument that someone makes is that they have too much power to censor and a history of abusing it, is it not common sense that using your power to silence this ad is (or simply really really looks like, even if this isn't factually the case) completely proving your opponent's point?
The centralization part has definitely happened. Everyone these days is on email run by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. The curation and moderation problem hasn't because it doesn't apply, as email isn't a social network. (I suppose you could make the case that spam is an analogous issue, but the major email providers all have their own spam "moderation" systems.)
All right. That sounds nice, but... when has it ever happened in reality? Human nature simply doesn't work that way. Social systems have always tended towards centralization over time, because as a whole we find that the benefits of centralization outweigh the benefits of decentralization.
Most people simply don't have the time or expertise to devote towards "curating their own experience," which means they'd be driven to adapt third parties' curations, and those third parties would inevitably consolidate, and within 10 years (at the very most; likely far less) we'd be essentially back where we started, with two or three centralized massive curation systems that everyone's using, all having the same problems of moderation at scale.
Then by that standard, isn't it more urgent to declare plastic payment cards "a scam and nothing more"? 2018 saw some $9-billion in payment card fraud in the US alone - that's $173-million a week.
No, because with payment cards, the "and nothing more" isn't there.
If we're talking about "2018... in the US alone", 2018 US GDP was around 20.5 trillion dollars. Consumer spending probably accounted for somewhere around 70% of that or around $14.35T. Let's pretend, just for the sake of this discussion, that only half of that takes place with cards, and that that's all of the card transactions; that business and government spending are all performed purely with cash, wire transfers, etc. (Obviously neither of these points are true, but I don't have hard data so I'm going for deliberately low values.) This gives us an unrealistically low estimate of around $7.2T as the size of the "payment card economy" in the US for 2018.
This makes the $9 billion in fraud represent approximately 0.13% of the total payment card economy. In other words, it's statistically negligible. With Bitcoin, on the other hand, there is no trillion-dollar economy. There's barely an economy at all!
Think about it. When was the last time you heard about crypto financial transactions for anything other than people using it on the dark web for illicit dealings or hackers demanding cryptocurrency as payment for ransomware removal? (Speculators buying and selling it like stocks doesn't count; we're talking about cryptocurrency being used as a currency here, not as a commodity.) The size of the "cryptocurrency economy," not counting crime--which is a fair comparison as it's typically excluded from GDP calculations--is essentially zero.
I think you know that is a ludicrous exaggeration.
No, it's really not. Not all of the problems end up getting enough press to become "high-profile," but they do keep occurring over and over and over again on a distressingly common basis.
Queen Anne's copyright law (the first) was explicitly motivated by the need to protect the income of creators and licensed publishers (the artists get paid through the license).
Wrong. The explicit motivation was to protect authors from publishers. When copyright strays from a limit on the predatory nature of publishers to an enabler thereof, it's been corrupted and needs to be restored to its original purpose.
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 203: Crying Wolf Over Conservative Censorship
Re: Re: Re: Re: sad
Are you sure he's the one who originated the saying? Wikipedia calls it a traditional aphorism.
On the post: John Oliver Robocalls Ajit Pai For Not Doing More To Thwart Robocalls
Shouldn't that be "expanding" the definition?
On the post: Do People Want A Better Facebook, Or A Dead Facebook?
It makes sense if you don't start from the perspective of assuming that Facebook, with its long track record of outright contempt towards privacy, is sincere in their claims that they care about privacy now.
Billions of people also used leaded gasoline. That doesn't mean that doing away with it wasn't a very good thing.
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Re:
No, because it does not operate via a mechanism of a chain of blocks verified by cryptographic signatures.
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Re:
Mandatory within what bounds?
I've spent my whole career as a programmer, and none of the software I've written professionally has had any competition from the FOSS realm, because it's all been highly domain-specific stuff that's for very specific business users who are not programmers.
Open-source software tends to get written for one of two use cases. Either tools that programmers build because they personally find it useful, or stuff that appeals to a very broad, general-audience user base (web browsers and games, for example.) If it doesn't fall into one of these two categories, the odds that an open-source project to cover it will even exist at all are extremely narrow.
So hopefully you aren't calling for a "general ban" on non-open-source software, because in practice this would equate to a ban on 90% of all software, period. But if not, what specifically do you want to mandate here?
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Client =/= Hosting
Why are you bringing lock-in into this? I didn't say anything about lock-in. I said that centralization is inevitable, and demonstrated that it has happened in the realm of email when you tried to claim that email was a counterexample. Nothing more. Once again, please stop putting words in my mouth.
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Client =/= Hosting
I didn't say anything about monopolies here; please stop misrepresenting me. What I said was that it's human nature that large numbers of small groups will consolidate and centralize into small numbers of large groups, and that the example given, email providers, does in fact follow this pattern, both in individual email and in the business realm.
Pointing out that Microsoft and Google have multiple different ways to manage email does nothing to change the fact that people are managing their email with Microsoft and Google systems.
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Client =/= Hosting
Yes, obviously some minor outliers do exist. But they're statistically insignificant enough to disregard when talking about the big picture. If someone refers to "all" or "none" in a discussion like this, it should properly be understood as including the words "within epsilon."
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re: Client =/= Hosting
But that's my point. Even with an open protocol, business email still all managed by Microsoft's Outlook system. Centralization happened anyway.
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Re: Re:
No, breaking them up would be punishing them for being abusive, which is a highly desirable thing in civilized society. (It's basically half of what people generally have in mind when they discuss the concept of "justice.") And if being abusive is how they grew to be so successful, then by all means, let's destroy that!
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Umm.
Again, when taking down the ad can be used as evidence to further the agenda the ad was attempting to drive, it's not a particularly good idea.
Sometimes you're in a situation where there are no good options. Hypothetically, this could happen to you just because, and then life sucks for you. In reality--particularly in the business world--it usually happens as a result of you having done something to earn it.
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yes, and I was including that in my statement. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Every office I've ever worked at, the work email ran on Outlook, which is run by Microsoft. I'm aware of a few competitors in that space, but the only one I know of that has gotten any traction comes from...
...wait for it...
Google!
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm actually very familiar with the "pendulum" in question, and you're unfortunately framing it quite out of context here. I'm talking about social structures, and you're responding with an example based on technological limitations. The underlying technical issues you're addressing weren't about centralized vs. decentralized social structures, but about centralized vs. individual technological work.
We started out with big mainframes because computers were big and expensive--a super-scarce resource--and the most efficient way to make use of them was to build way more computer than one person needed and share it between many people. Once Moore's Law got us to the point where individuals could have their own desktop computers with the processing power to take care of the work they needed, starting in the late 70s, things shifted to that paradigm because it simply works a lot better for various technical and user-experience reasons. But most computer work, even in the mainframe era, was not "social" in the sense we think of it today; it was a bunch of individuals sharing a powerful server.
Then, a couple decades later in the late 90s, the Web browser came along and made the Internet accessible to the average Joe. The Web was built on top of the Internet, which was originally designed as a decentralized system for a very, very specific purpose--to provide widespread geographic redundancy in order to make the total destruction of important information difficult even in the event of a nuclear attack, because Cold War--and started out with a decentralized architecture by default simply because it inherited that from the Internet. But the technical systems were a rigid client/server setup reminiscent of the old-time mainframes, because that was easy to implement.
Over time, both of these factors have flipped around. Without the specific constraints that applied to the design of the original Internet providing an overriding direction, human nature has run its course and we've seen the Web as a social system consolidate and centralize. On the technological front, however, we've re-learned the lessons of the past, that the rigid mainframe/client setup sucks for a number of reasons, and developed all sorts of technologies to push as much of the individual work of the Web as possible down to the individual client devices. Technologies such as AJAX, websockets, SPA frameworks and most notably smartphone apps that run mostly locally but use Internet connections to augment their functionality are indicative of this trend.
The social and technological sides of the Internet are distinct things that work in different ways (hence the common admonition in developer circles not to try to solve a social problem with a technical solution) and conflating the two simply causes confusion.
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Umm.
To paraphrase a famous quote from Jurassic Park, don't spend so much time thinking about whether you can that you forget to consider whether you should.
If you're going to appeal to common sense, consider this: When the argument that someone makes is that they have too much power to censor and a history of abusing it, is it not common sense that using your power to silence this ad is (or simply really really looks like, even if this isn't factually the case) completely proving your opponent's point?
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The centralization part has definitely happened. Everyone these days is on email run by Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. The curation and moderation problem hasn't because it doesn't apply, as email isn't a social network. (I suppose you could make the case that spam is an analogous issue, but the major email providers all have their own spam "moderation" systems.)
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
Re: Re:
All right. That sounds nice, but... when has it ever happened in reality? Human nature simply doesn't work that way. Social systems have always tended towards centralization over time, because as a whole we find that the benefits of centralization outweigh the benefits of decentralization.
Most people simply don't have the time or expertise to devote towards "curating their own experience," which means they'd be driven to adapt third parties' curations, and those third parties would inevitably consolidate, and within 10 years (at the very most; likely far less) we'd be essentially back where we started, with two or three centralized massive curation systems that everyone's using, all having the same problems of moderation at scale.
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Re: Re: Re: Re:
No, because with payment cards, the "and nothing more" isn't there.
If we're talking about "2018... in the US alone", 2018 US GDP was around 20.5 trillion dollars. Consumer spending probably accounted for somewhere around 70% of that or around $14.35T. Let's pretend, just for the sake of this discussion, that only half of that takes place with cards, and that that's all of the card transactions; that business and government spending are all performed purely with cash, wire transfers, etc. (Obviously neither of these points are true, but I don't have hard data so I'm going for deliberately low values.) This gives us an unrealistically low estimate of around $7.2T as the size of the "payment card economy" in the US for 2018.
This makes the $9 billion in fraud represent approximately 0.13% of the total payment card economy. In other words, it's statistically negligible. With Bitcoin, on the other hand, there is no trillion-dollar economy. There's barely an economy at all!
Think about it. When was the last time you heard about crypto financial transactions for anything other than people using it on the dark web for illicit dealings or hackers demanding cryptocurrency as payment for ransomware removal? (Speculators buying and selling it like stocks doesn't count; we're talking about cryptocurrency being used as a currency here, not as a commodity.) The size of the "cryptocurrency economy," not counting crime--which is a fair comparison as it's typically excluded from GDP calculations--is essentially zero.
On the post: Everyone's Overreacting To The Wrong Thing About Facebook (Briefly) Blocking Elizabeth Warren's Ads
You keep making this point--and I agree, it's true--but you never draw any conclusions from it.
Content moderation at scale is impossible, and therefore... what should happen?
On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech
Re: Re:
No, it's really not. Not all of the problems end up getting enough press to become "high-profile," but they do keep occurring over and over and over again on a distressingly common basis.
On the post: Top EU Court Rules Public Interest Is More Important Than Protection Of Commercial Interests
Re: Re:
Wrong. The explicit motivation was to protect authors from publishers. When copyright strays from a limit on the predatory nature of publishers to an enabler thereof, it's been corrupted and needs to be restored to its original purpose.
Next >>